Guerrilla warfare inside the PNC

Oct 17, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Anyone who thinks that electoral politics or extra-parliamentary activism can remove the PPP Government and that it can happen without the presence of the PNC is a person who knows absolutely nothing about Guyana.
The AFC may one day become stronger than the older, large political parties. But for now, the PNC is a huge, established fifty-seven-year party with massive support in Guyana. If one hopes for the removal of the PPP in a general election or through Arab Spring activism, the PNC has to be involved.
Against this background, it must be alarming for Guyanese to know that the bitter divide between the PNC hierarchy and the Linden PNC constituency is turning a dangerous bend where there are no concrete rails. Things are just getting from bad to worse between Congress Place and Linden. If ever Guyana needs a brilliant mediator, it is now.
I was having lunch with Leonard Craig and Lincoln Lewis on Tuesday at a little, cozy Creole restaurant in Charlotte Street owned by a fellow Wortmanville man. A gentleman came up to our table and said, “Look what is happening to the PNC; check Facebook man.” We asked him to read it and he did. Since that Tuesday morning, lots of people are talking about this boiling water inside the PNC.
This is a trenchant disagreement between two top figures in the PNC leadership – one from Linden, a definite future leader of the PNC, the other from Congress Place, one of the nicest persons you can find in the PNC and a soldier whose service in the seventies and eighties extended not only to Guyana but also to the Third World.
If this volcanic quarrel is not quelled immediately, it will harm the PNC in big ways. Sadly, the poignant exchange is now public knowledge and one hopes that an escalation does not take place. Here now is a point I made to Craig and Lewis as we discussed the acidic disagreement between the two PNC leaders.
I borrowed from my experience living in Grenada when Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his deputy Bernard Coard were on a regime of constant exchange of denunciation. In psychology, once you tell a person you are going to get them, they will try to get you before you can fire your first salvo.
If you know that you have no intention to confront them then don’t say it. But once you telegraph your thoughts, there will be a reaction. There are poisonous quarrels inside the PNC and the lessons of Grenada are being ignored. What the PNC needs at this moment is what they don’t have – a Ptolemy Reid. Could a Rashleigh Jackson fill the void? But for sure the PNC needs some healing.
The rumbles inside the PNC could not come at a worse time for this country. After twenty-three years of domination by the PPP, the Guyanese people sense the fall of the PPP. The theory is that protracted incumbency has caught up with the PPP. It is a theory that only holds partial validity.
The inherent danger of the PPP is that it is essentially an authoritarian party. From the beginning, it had an authoritarian structure shaped by the communist culture. This route the PNC missed. The PNC was born as a middle class, liberal party. Down the years Burnham made it into a socialist outfit, but the transformation did wipe out its liberal middle class moorings, because many of these kinds of folks remained in the state system.
Once the PPP stays in power, it will continue to lack even a trace of human kindness. Incumbency has nothing to do with Minister Benn’s order to remove poor women from selling bottled water along Irving Street and Vlissengen Road on the flimsy excuse that they are encumbering the parapet. President Ramotar lets Benn get away with this unkind act.
In the midst of the crumbling PPP, the PNC chooses to start a guerrilla war inside its party. Surely, all PNC activists must know that the infighting is playing into the hands of the PPP. It is unthinkable that the main PNC official for Linden actually called in the police to man the gate where PNC supporters were picketing.
Isn’t there anyone from the PNC who could have gone and talked to the gate-protestors? Why were the police summoned? By any stretch of the imagination this was a mistake. The PNC is making too many mistakes at a time when it should partner the AFC in a final push for regime change. Time will never wait for any person in this world. It never did.

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Guerrilla warfare inside the PNC

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